Leaders then, leaders now

Feb 21, 2024 Editorial

Kaieteur News – It is a marvel, a local political leadership wonder, the tongue twisting that comes up when serious issues have to be faced. They are all for it when out of office, when government leaders are lashed with verbal chains. But when the same leaders, once so vigorous in opposition, take the reins of office, they become dark and dangerous night, when compared to the light and right that they pretended to stand for before. Guyanese have politicians that are either the worst of hypocrites, or ones that are serial purveyors of falsehoods. We think that most of them know what they are doing, what they really are about, but about which they don’t care. If making a blustery speech before the highest, biggest audience gives the loudest cheer, then that is what will have to be, and was. The past, when the PPPC was in opposition, was about energy and driving intensity. The present when the PPPC is the government, is about what is flaccid, reveals the shallowness of what went before.

Fiery speeches were made by different opposition PPPC members in parliament, and on other occasions. The issue was about pay and other benefits for public servants, which includes teachers now prompted by circumstances to strike. There was none louder, none more ferocious, than top PPPC opposition presences. The video clips are there as evidence, the rhetorical flameouts sharp and scorching, with every word freighted with meaning, with significance for public servants, including teachers. Compare that to where teachers and public servants are today, when the same PPPC is in government, with all the power in its hands, and with the same energetic political figures now backtracking and slithering (like cunning serpents) around their own words that were articulated just a few short years ago. It is possible that the passage of a handful of years has accelerated their decline into amnesia, and the paranoia that is such second nature to PPPC leadership.

The working class, once so treasured by the champions of the PPPC, is now the oppressed and denounced class. Oppression, not from the fertile minds and powerful hands of imperialists and colonialists, but from the PPPC itself out to outdo the old masters. They once battled Guyanese workers for every ounce of gain, even inflicted much pain on them for their courageous efforts to get more, and do better. Today, collective bargaining is tantamount to two curse words, for the resistance that it encounters under this government, this leadership now so characterized by deviousness and denial.

It is the kind of leadership deviousness that propels to saying what suits circumstances, and that’s all there is to it. This is the new art of professional practitioners well-versed in the con game. Give the people what they want to hear, but give them nothing else. Recall again the PPPC when it was in opposition, and its leadership postures with the nation’s rich oil patrimony. There was none better at condemning the 2016 oil contract executed by the APNU+AFC Coalition government than the PPPC opposition. The ExxonMobil contract was a felony, the contract was the worst of calumnies. It must be torn apart, and rebuilt from scratch. As in the example of teachers, what emerged from the then opposition leadership relative to the ExxonMobil contract was nothing but a farce, a political ploy, to get back into office. Simply scan where the same political leadership in the PPPC, now the sitting government, is today with that same oil contract.

The word renegotiation is an abomination to them. Those Guyanese daring to call for renegotiation are transformed into lowlifes, enemies, and criminals. Their crime is wanting better, and calling on the government leadership to make good on their words delivered when they were in opposition. Instead of doing what is right and fair for Guyanese, the PPPC leadership is committed body and soul to jump and deliver on every wish and command of ExxonMobil. Their words give them away, their timid body language makes Guyanese wonder what happened to the warriors against the oil contract when they were in opposition.

On the bigger things in Guyanese life (workers’ rights, patrimony rights), the PPPC leadership is puny, sickly, but still tricky.

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